the government will continue to function for a couple more months. emergency measures will be used to keep the money flowing, so to speak. this is unrelated to the fiscal cliff, so it's an additional problem that everybody has to deal with. of course the worst thing is we know how horrible it was the last time the debt ceiling needed to be raised in the summer of 2011, it went down to the wire and it looked as if there was a chance the united states would not raise the borrowing limit and default. we heard talk about social security payments not going out and that kind of thing. that's all led to the first downgrade in the u.s. credit rating, the stock market tanked. that was a ugly scenario. on top of the fiscal cliff, we may go through this all over again. it's another drag on the markets and on the whole economy at exactly the wrong time. >> when you say drag, though, give us an example of what you mean. we talked about january 2nd, everybody goes back to work and markets open. are we going to see a lot of volatility. all of a sudden it crashes do